Global computer networks such as the Internet have allowed electronic commerce (“e-commerce”) to flourish to a point where a large number of customers purchase goods and services over websites operated by online merchants. Because the Internet provides an effective medium to reach this large customer base, online merchants who are new to the e-commerce marketplace are often flooded with high customer traffic from the moment their websites are rolled out. In order to effectively serve customers, online merchants are charge with the same responsibility as conventional merchants: they must provide quality service to their customers in a timely manner. Often, insufficient computing resources are the cause of a bottleneck that results in customer frustration and loss of sales. This phenomena has resulted in the need for a new utility: leasable online computing infrastructure. Previous attempts at providing computing resources have entailed leasing large blocks of storage and processing power. However, for a new online merchant having no baseline from which to judge customer traffic upon rollout, this approach is inefficient. Either too much computing resources are leased, depriving a start up merchant of financial resources that are needed elsewhere in the operation, or not enough resources are leased, and a bottleneck occurs. Thus, there remains a heartfelt need for computer infrastructure that can be provided in an on demand basis.
One impediment to providing an on-demand computer infrastructure involves application migration. A migrating application instance, along with any applications the migrating instance is communicating with, must maintain a consistent view of the migrating application's network identity for interoperability. For example, consider a client application that is communicating with a server application having an IP address of a.b.c.d. The client application initiates two sequential data connections to a server. Between the first and the second connection, however, the server gets moved to a network node having the IP address a.b.c.z. If the IP address of the server was a real IP address (associated with a physical interface) of the first host, the second connection would not address the correct machine.